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Monday, March 14, 2011

Have I Lost My Mind...

I've never been much of an athlete. I was a chubby, sweaty, uncoordinated kid who during PE spent most of my time trying to hide in the bleachers or the outfield. During the bi-yearly presidential test I could never run the full mile or do a single chin up. My proclivity to duck and hide when an object was headed my way made me rubbish at all team sports. In junior high I had a few years of being a decent basketball player, but that can mainly be chalked up to the fact that I was 5'7'' at 12 and it took both the girls a boys a few years to catch up. By high school I'd completely quit trying. I took the one year of required PE in which my coach would spend a significant amount of time yelling at me and my friends to, "get off your a*%&$ and move". My college required 2 credits of PE which I fulfilled doing an online health class, for which I was required to walk three times a week. Sports just really weren't my thing. Then I married an athlete. My husband took third place in the Utah State Wresting Championships two years in a row. (He's informed me on multiple occasions that he could have easily beat the kid who took second but that's not the way bracketing sports work ; ). He's the kind of guy who used to take six mile jogs in the afternoon for fun. He is a gazelle to my hippo. In our early marriage years he'd encourage me to ride a bike along side him as he ran or to lift weights with him at night while we were watching TV. Since then I've gotten more into exercise but I'm still not particularly good at it. That being said, I'm pretty sure I'm going to sign up for a 10K being held in my town April 30th. The last two years in a row I've watched my friends run Marathons on that day. It's been exciting and the hype of the event fills the entire town. Last year I thought, "why haven't I tried to run"....not the Marathon of course because that would be nutso! To my sister and my friends Bruce, Jason, and Kristin who ran last year. Congrats! To my friends Nancy and Kara who are planning to run this year, you are awesome! But for me personally, THERE IS NO WAY, EVER!!!! But I still want to participate in the hype, and since they run multiple distance races on the day, six weeks or so ago I thought, why not run the 5K. So one day at the gym I started to jog. I made it a mile without dying but thought, "why am I planning on doing this again?". The next day I went 1.5. At the end of the week I was up to 2.0. I called my sister and said, "Hey I ran 7.5 miles this week. I'm pretty sure that's more than I've run the entire last two years." The next week I ran 8. With nine weeks to go I ran 2 on a Monday, 2.5 on a Wednesday, and then 3.0 on a Friday. It was the moment that I realized it would be totally possible for me to jog my way through a 5K but wondered, "Would it be possible for me, the hippo [graceful in the water, retched on land :)] to do a 10K." My sister signed my brother in law (my partner in chubby crime) up for a 10K. Maybe it is possible, and since this year the 5K has to run the night before the marathon it would definitely be more fun. I went online and found an eight week training sheet for a 10K with a first week that had you run 2, 2, 2.5, and I thought, "Yes this is totally possible." And so that is how today I find myself having run 3.5 miles the furthest distance that this water loving animal has every gone, which contrary to what I would have imagined feels PRETTY DARN GREAT!